Project Management: It’s Not Just About Timelines and Tasks

If project management was as easy as moving from one step to another on a set timeline, your development company would never run into any problems. In the real world, projects encounter difficulties every day. Overcoming these issues requires an integrated approach to keep teams on target and deliver what customers are looking for.

Project Management Woes

Traditional project management suffers from a variety of problems:

Poor communication due to a lack of collaborative tools

Too much time spent in meetings, on phone calls and reading emails

Confusion about expectations and goals

Use of too many separate apps and programs

Lack of knowledge regarding available resources

Little or no guidance from management

Together, these challenges create a stressful environment that impedes productivity. It’s impossible to deliver a quality finished project to a client if employees and supervisors are spending most of their time trying to figure out who’s doing what and how to bring all the different elements together into a cohesive whole.

Taking an Integrated Approach

Integrated project management consolidate the many aspects of traditional project management to make the process easier and more efficient. Project management systems designed for this type of management provide a framework that supports every aspect of a job to create a clear picture of how your team is going to get from the development phase to the final product.

Consolidate Processes

An integrated project management system takes previously disconnected tasks such as time management, resource allocation, communication and accounting and brings them together in one platform. You may also be able to add on services such as document sharing, real-time cost monitoring and payroll management. With everything in one place, you and your team have familiar processes to follow that streamline each job, and it’s also possible to cater the functionality of the platform to best serve the needs of individual projects.

Monitor Resources

The success of a project is largely determined by the availability of time, money and manpower. It’s possible to have more than enough of all three and still wind up with a project that’s not on schedule or that’s going over budget. Taking an integrated approach makes it much easier to monitor and assign resources to different parts of a job. Supervisors can track exactly how much time and money is being spent as the project progresses and keep an eye on how many employees are available to pick up the slack should one element begin to lag behind others.

Stay on Schedule

Having an entire team use one tool for all of their work lets project supervisors and managers set deadlines for each element and match tasks up with the employees that have the appropriate skills to deliver good results. Monitoring tools ensure that no one winds up going off on an unrelated tangent that has the potential to halt progress.

Keep in Touch

Being able to make notes and send messages without having to leave the project management environment cuts out a lot of time that is otherwise wasted sending separate emails. Collaboration across departments is easier since supervisors can communicate with the entire team at once rather than having to call a meeting before work can progress. Plus, when all of the project information is in one place, clients can be given comprehensive status updates at a moment’s notice.

Work Remotely

Any team member can log into an integrated project management system from any device whenever they have an idea to share or a note to make. This allows jobs to continue flowing even when major contributors are out of the office. Should something important occur to a team member after office hours, it can be added to the project without having to wait until business resumes the next day.

Taking an integrated approach to project management simplifies the process for developers, supervisors and employees. When every member of a team knows exactly what needs to be done and has the tools to do it, the work flows smoothly and jobs are completed on time. An integrated project management system offers everything you need to ensure that your team stays on target to deliver the best possible quality to every customer.